skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure. Most responsible lower-middle class or poor families can't afford an iPad, but something in the $99-300 range is doable. This is the trajectory that smart phones went: I see tons of people with Android Crickets.

As others have pointed out, this should have no bearing on Apple's success: I've never met someone who wanted a MacBook Pro who changed their mind because of a $299 laptop at WalMart.
Yeah considering that they could have stolen millions of credit cards, this seems not that bad.

Asuming they have backups.
Not connected to the project, but I saw it, and thought it was an interesting approach. The specific instance isn't something I'd use, but reading comprehension for emotional content combined with ordinary CAPTCHA methods may work better against bots.
Don't really need backups for that, death is not permanent. No one's going to lose anything but time and patience.

Edit to add: Players who get killed by this aren't going to lose anything, which is what the link was talking about, but I guess its letting people who are in on it exploit content too - some of them may be rolled back, banned, or otherwise dealt with other than just the thing getting fixed, whatever it is.
2012 - End of World.. of Warcraft.

Mayans knew this.
apparently it's a client side hack for "WoW-plus", here's the ringleader on his own forums:

http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-w...

this isn't the first time Blizzard have messed up like this: they originally set the "Game Master" access level by a bit transmitted client side, and the same socket bit twiddling could be used to get into their private alpha servers...
User Experience Design Collection
This hack is eerily reminiscent of Morpheus coming to free the minds of all the people trapped in the matrix...
The interview answers were pretty much expected (I did enjoy the use of the 'bro-' prefix), but one of the questions...

"Speaking of confusion and what could have been going on in the minds of some of these people. … I think of Xbox Live and how there have always been racist and sexist comments you hear from people that you play with online. The confusion might be that that’s okay in the workplace..."

That's one of those connections that I made and had to decouple several times. So thanks VB for at least going for it; it's a flimsy connection but it's still an issue. Used to play a lot of xbox live and had little choice but to just learn to deal with all the comments or let the game suffer for lack of audio.
All three of these companies are built on a foundation of a bunch of users frantically sharing lots of content with each other, as fast as possible, for free; the result is something that may or may not actually have any value at all, despite insanely high valuations from investments and acquisitions.

In a way, the question of whether these companies are even "successful" at all is actually an important one to consider: they aren't terribly profitable (or are even operating at a loss) and, like many other Web 2.0 companies, are being held up by a promise that "with this many users, we will make money".

Yet, even when you reach the size of these companies--Facebook and Twitter are both larger than the entire possible network connected market in 1998 when these dreams were so horribly vivid--you still are in a horrible position of "ok, but how do we make money? we were told there was money :(".

Now, I'm not from Europe, but I get the impression talking with some people I know from there (who may just be biased or romanticizing) that this sort of insanity simply doesn't play as well in that market: that people think through their monetary decisions a little longer, and are less likely to be tricked.

Meanwhile, people in Europe really do seem to care more about information retention issues, and have passed numerous laws (sometimes ones that people consider quite over-the-top) that indicate a mindset in opposition to this "share everything about you as fast as possible so it can be monetized" concept.

So, if you are wording your statement or in any way reacting to this premise from a "how dare you insult other countries like that" mentality, you might should attempt to recast the position as "what about these other countries makes them better than us and less likely to waste their time building these things?".

(The same argument applies to the other example: many people consider the ideals that lead to Hollywood to be founded on a combination of narcism and rent-seeking; a ton of people go there and spend their lives in pursuit of something that will never work out for them, slowly violating more and more of their personal morals and boundaries in the hope of getting a little closer to their dream.)
>Unfortunately the people are all to ready to strike if they think that they're not getting their fair share of the income.

What's wrong with that?
Here's a video posted by one the script kiddies responsible for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoM_sOC7jMA&feature=playe...

Nothing too impressive to this "hack"...
Cool thanks. Might be nice to override the inspect method to display something nicer.
Slightly off-topic, but also very relevant. 36 years old, been coding at desk jobs since college.

My sitting-at-a-desk-all-day-related pain has been really eliminated by a very simple stretching technique. It's known as "upward dog pose" in yoga, but you don't need to do it as part of a yoga routine or anything like that. I've had friends have it recommended to them by doctors.

It's a simple, simple pose; Google "upward dog" for plenty of pictorial examples.

Just about anybody can benefit from doing this and other stretches several times a day, so it's fairly independent of whether you use a sitting desk, standing desk, or split your time between the two. Good luck!
That's what makes EVE so much more interesting to me. There's only one server. The monthly fee can be earned in-game. The economy is tied to actual dollars because it's so reliable. There have been plenty of universe-spanning conflicts that impact the entire game with genuine political drama, and the dev team steps back to let it unfold with minimal intervention.
There was a plague in WoW in 2005 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

Could be a similar sort of thing, or it could be a hack.
My other take: no. Highly customized Android tablets will (Kindle Fires and Nook tablets). Most users don't root them; they use them as the walled gardens they're designed to be. Pure Android devices will continue to be a minority.
(OP's article suggests this, with Fire's at 50% of "Android" tablet market)

To me, a Kindle Fire is as much an "Android" tablet as a Nexus 7 is a "Linux" tablet.
Yeah! The idea is to return the object in JSON
To Regulate Rapid Traders, S.E.C. Turns to One of Them
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-hole
http://goput.it/5gi.png
Was going to recommend freetype- and fontconfig-infinality, seems like i was too late.
Programming in Python, where whitespace is syntactically significant, with a proportional font, seems to be volunteering for an unnecessary burden. Reasonable people may differ.

The only mitigating factor would be that the spaces at the left margin all (presumably) have the same width.
An embedded key / value store for shell scripts
Since this is just turning into the "name your favorite mono-font" thread, I prefer Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Roman: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Bitstream-Vera-Sans-Mono (My old favorite used to be Courier New Bold.)
PHP Manual Masterpieces
I was a die-hard Netscape loyalist and Microsoft hater until 2000. I finally gave up NS4.7 for IE5.5 then, because Netscape wouldn't work on a large number of pages on the web. It would hang on their Javascript, or misrender page layouts.

I'm still a Microsoft hater, but IE did win because it was better. Netscape totally dropped the ball on that.
No, its not a price point that the market resolved.

Its not like a moving company that has a businesses with costs and then they compete with other identical businesses and test the customers and have a price discovery phase and then arrive at a price.

Spotify is a solution to the environment of widespread P2P/piracy.

The people were offered a price: $0 on Napster/Limewire/Oink. They accepted the offer. Great, the market has spoken; that's what the content is deemed to be worth. Its worthless. Its worthless because it is possible to obtain it without paying for it.

In any industry whatsoever if you offer a price of $0 then people will take it. Try offering beer for $0 — maybe you can support it with advertising ;)

The price point that Spotify is offering is in competion with piracy. That's why it is so low.

> If you don't like it, take your songs off spotify.

Why would I do that ? I love Spotify. There is no income in it for me as a rights holder, but there's no benefit for me to remove it. [I am far more likely to remove my music from iTunes actually. its just not a good look, there are better digital stores]

I think they have great intentions and want desperately to make this new economy work. They cannot just raise the price (they would love to) because they could kill the whole thing and sales would drop off. They are losing money in order to keep this thing going.

What I said was that its use for the user is to replace sales; but the payment and pricing (in and out) are like that of broadcast.

Its a very unfortunate disruption.

> Spotify isn't cheating you out of anything.

sigh. people are so binary when discussing this stuff. Its more complicated. It would be nice if people weren't so hostile and always trying to identify a bad guy to blame everything on.
I think there's a ton of room at the bottom. There was a time when DVD players and home computers were out of the reach of the poor or lower middle class. Most (responsible) people can't afford a $500+ tablet, but the promise of tablet computing still applies to them. It's a lie to say that the promise of tablet computing can only be accomplished in a $500+ package. There's tons of room for tablets that are $250 or less - see all the "low end" phone providers that now have Android offerings.
An expert finds NYC's air is full of foreign matter, including rubber and rust
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/mircryption/ind...
Dressed atoms get to be qubits for longer, show promise for quantum computing
If I remember right, there was a post on HN here a while ago about how there's a dot pattern embedded in all WoW screenshots, so they can identify who the user is even if they remove the character name from the screen.

If they have the account information on this, I have to wonder if they could actually sue someone (instead of just banning them) for using this hack?
Usage of Mac version of Netbot for App.net
Not that "High-PPI" is all that useful of a term either, any more than "Ultra High Frequency" or "Very High Frequency" or "Super High Frequency".
You could easily be a Night Elf's World of Earthcraft avatar on some server blade in some cooler universe than ours.
I don't think Fred Wilson's point was that they all use a common interface. Being a VC, I'm guessing the app compatibility is the thing he cares about.
If the accusations are automated, can't the disputes also be automated?
Can you send me some specifics (jon dot galloway at microsoft dot com)? At a minimum I'd like to make sure we've got a bug filed on the di / filters issue you mention, but more importantly I want to see what we can do about the support issues you're hitting.
robert@chromablue.net
SecTor: Old Security Vulnerabilities Live On
This is what brilliant design is all about.

This lisp system has a small kernel, and almost entirely written in Lisp, so it is extremely efficient and portable.

SBCL and MIT Scheme has a similar architecture and could be easily ported.

Now, what about rebuilding openjdk-1.7.0?)) And then run, say, mvn install clojure?))
In an office full of Retina MacBooks, I love my ThinkPad X220 (and this is my fourth ThinkPad in a row, spanning both Lenovo and IBM eras). It's not a flashy machine, but it's got a bunch of non-mainstream features that are devoted to getting things done, at which they excel:

- Nub pointer? I love it. Full mouse control without moving my hands significantly away from where they were on the keyboard anyways. My X220 has a trackpad, but I only use it by accident.

- An LED that lives above the monitor and has a shield that points it down to light up the keyboard. This is a lifesaver on long flights.

- Docking stations. I've got two USB drives, a pair of headphones, a few USB-powered accessories, two monitors, a mouse, and a keyboard plugged into my computer when it's at the office. My MBP-toting coworkers have to connect and disconnect all that when they pick up their computer; I press the big undock button and it all stays where I left it, and reconnects when I put it back on the desk.

- Accessory comparability. I've still got the power adapters from the first ThinkPad I had. They work fine on my current one, and mean that I have more of these bricks than I could ever need - so I can keep one at work, in my go bag, at my home office, in my living room, in my kitchen, and still have a few backups around.

- Repair manuals. Want to know how to do any type of repair on your ThinkPad? The repair manual is freely available, and tells you exactly how to do anything you'd like to. To swap out the network adapter, for example, involves taking off the keyboard and going from the top.

Was ordering it in the first place a pleasant experience? No. The website sucked, I had to call in to do half the customization I wanted, and it still took two months to get here.
Almost certainly, if by "overtake" one means "sells more units" and Android means "is built on a fork of Android". Apple will likely continue to capture the overwhelming share of profit.
Does anyone know what the paulultra font is? pdffonts lists the following fonts in use:

HTFDidot-B11Bold
HTFDidot-M16Medium
PaulultraPlain

PDF: http://viewer.zmags.com/services/DownloadPDF?publicationID=6...
It's interesting to comprehend the amount of lives a hack like this will positively affect.

How many will pick up a book, or go for a walk, now that they no longer have their go-to fix of virtual reality. How many WOW addicts will have time to think "never again" and follow through.

Equivalent to all the cigarettes in the world vanishing for a few hours? Possibly. And equally as effective I say.
It doesn't matter how hard switching is for the browser, what matters is how hard switching was for the OS - that's where Microsoft had a monopoly. In that, switching was very hard. They were trying to leverage that monopoly in a new market (browsers).
not to mention http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4328660 where the author posted the same article to another site.

my reaction, then and now:

"4 hours: This is probably the only realistic estimation. It is large enough to have some margin for unexpected problems, while the task is still small enough to grasp."

1. Estimate everything in 4 hour increments
2. 100% accurate estimates
3. Pizza party
Remembering Your First Computer Is For Old People
Without rooting, you already have more freedom with android: you can install any application outside of google market.
I see tablets and PCs merging more in the future, as the current trends indicate. Tablets will become smarter, PCs dumber. They'll meet somewhere in the middle.

That being the case, the market is too big, and too important, to have 1 single hardware/software vendor dominate it in the way iPod dominated the music player market. The iPod's dominance had a negative effect on that market; it effectively killed it. And once Apple found something more profitable, they stopped innovating on it as well.
It looks like there were some videos posted from the point of view of the hackers. Doesn't Blizzard put watermarks in each of the clients? They can track it to the licenses which people bought, and probably to the people themselves, no?
It's probably not slick enough to blend into an office with a glamorous interior design.

http://www.eurotech.cz/image/file/361/x60_2.jpg

But when I see this, I get an urge to touch the keyboard, run the shell, fire up the editor... No other laptop makes me want to do this just with its looks.

And that's what I think good industrial design is about.
Debating whether to be impressed or disappointed that this has its own wikipedia article ...
And this is why making Diablo 3 work on servers, too, was a terrible idea (among other reasons).
I think I have to disagree here. From my experience, working as a team is the centerpoint of German work culture. This includes giving each member of a team the oportunity to contribute in discussions and then also taking their suggestions seriously. The hierarchy is there, but rather at the same level or below the level of most other European countries.

In France, on the other hand, hierarchy is very strict, including within a team. Supposedly, this is caused by the French higher education system.

Taken together, the German and the French model often produce horrible failures when a French company tries to expand into Germany. If there is a problem to be solved within a team, the German Engineers/Workers will expect to hear the following at a meeting: "Listen guys, we have to change this and that, how do you think we could do it?". A French manager, however, is trained to walk into the meeting and say "We are now doing it like this.".

Generally, I would recommend to stop associating strict hierarchy with Germany. Things have been changing for at least 40 Years now and in many fields (probably not all however) the amount of hierarchy is "normal". Things like pulling rank are observed rather seldomly in the technical fields. If you want to see how these things used to be a long time ago, you might want to look at Austria.

Also, if you want a reason for why there is no SV-like feel to any of the German technology "hubs", I'd suggest risk-aversion as a reason. If you asked me what the most central collective character trait of todays Germans is, my answer would be risk-aversion. When you tell a German what he can gain, he will ask you what he could lose.

On a side note, be careful when forming an opinion about Europe if your only fluent European language is English. Things might look very different on the other side of the language barrier. When talking about Germany, for instance, even the most carefully written publication from the UK will have inaccuracies in it. The way in which todays Germany and the Germanys past are convoluted in public discourse in the UK will influence anybody living there, even if he actively tries to avoid it. On the other side of the coin, natives or expats that live in a European country and tell you about it also have narratives, usually heavyly influenced by how they want to see themselves and their nationality. You basically can't trust anyone.
> How many WOW addicts will have time to think "never again" and follow through

Somewhere between -infinity and zero.
As you probably are aware, this is not entirely unlikely:

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

An interesting read by world-renown philosopher Nick Bostrom.
It certainly raises some questions for the "notability" police.
Providing APIs for content-driven websites
That’s a really interesting anecdote, but not fully thinking through the security implications of the Web in 1996 is not the same thing as royally screwing up in 2012.
It's pretty obvious why no-one bought anything: The Windows 8 machines were there to try only. Windows 8 hasn't been released yet. And the windows 7 phones are going to be obsolete in a couple of months when the win 8 phones come out.
Admin consoles: the soft underbelly of billion dollar software operations since...

Seriously, though: you almost certainly have one if you run a software business. Client side SSH certificates are your friend. If you're not able to do that, because it is really annoying, separate it from the main app and lock it down as much as possible. (Separate authentication from the main site/app's authentication scheme. Lock down access, ideally at the network level. Strongly consider two-factor auth.)
Also a lot of EVE is actually played outside the game... think about traders and crafters and their excel spreadsheets or websites put together for trade networks.

And of course the spies! Their activities went so far as cutting an important fleet commanders electricity so his thousand-of-real-world-dollars titan could be shot down.

EVE is fascinating!
In my experience "Lenovo thinkpads are bad" is a meme that started as a prediction ("Lenovo thinkpads will be bad") and somehow kept on being trotted out on rare occasion for reasons unknown. The T and X series from Lenovo are both brilliant. The only complaint I can muster is the unfortunate trend in screen resolutions.

My T60p is a rock solid machine, and the T420 I have right now only improves on that. It is without a doubt the same machine, it has an unbelievable sense of identity, but it is better.
The excessive use of "fuck" and "shit" throughout the entire article really takes away from its message. It just seems very immature. It's hard for me to take it seriously when it sounds like it was written by an angsty teenager who's trying to look tough in front of his friends, or something like that.
private server...
JavaScript Mixins: Beyond Simple Object Extension
I'm going to assume it's much more than one physical box, probably big chunks of several data centres.

In MMO terminology "server" seems to refer to a single self contained game world.
The iPod has 4 form factors.
Silicon Valley is successful because it was successful in the past. That attracts talented people looking to make it big, and it attracts money.

You can put a narrative spin on it if you like, pin it on West-Coast entrepreneurial spirit. Everyone likes to believe that their kind are a cut above, after all.
IE4 and IE5 were:

* Faster than Navigator.

* Had more features than Navigator, DHTML being the most important.

* Were highly compatible with content written for Navigator.

Navigator ran on more platforms. So yeah, if you were not running on Windows, Navigator was superior.
Those screenshots are probably the victims', anyway. While Blizzard probably does have enough logging to track this down on their end, it's fairly easy to get a trial account with bogus account information, so it would be back to grabbing their IP addresses and pleading with some ISP to reveal their real identity.
Actually, your post is more deserving of your little award. Congrats!
Interesting hack.

As some of the MMORPGs have multi-million dollar economies,
they'll need to increase their PCI level compliance.

This reminds me of Charlie Stross's Halting State[1].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State
In fact, I'm pretty sure if you put an invalid font name in you get a default proportional font.
There's no confirmation of a "hack." This is purely speculation.
Just got my T430s 6 weeks after ordering. Lenovo charged and uncharged my debit card and revised their shipping estimate 5+ times. 5 days before receiving the machine, I received an email telling me that federal regulations did not permit them to continue to keep the order 'pending' and that if I did not respond and waive my rights under these regulations, they would cancel my order for me. I did not respond.

They have serious fulfillment issues.
This thread could be social engineering to get someone to show some code in their editor which is 'secret sauce' to the project. :)
I think you severely overestimate the impact of in-game death.
I didn't have any major problems with the Transformer Prime. GPS on that big tablet is pretty much useless anyway, and the battery life given my the keyboard was awesome on conference trips. Here is a liveblog I wrote with vim on the Prime: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/symfony-live/

I even had a Ubuntu chroot on the machine for Node.js projects, and if the keyboard hadn't been so bad that could be now my primary computer. Instead, I switched it to Nexus 7 and again do any longer writing on my 11" MBA...
They cut his real world electricity?